Simon Wakeman

Simon Wakeman

It's been emotional

Designing customer processes to trigger desired emotional reactions is a key way of differentiating your product or service from its competitors. This is particularly true online where the differentiator of personal service doesn’t come into play.

Since I worked with leading UK internet bank Egg I’ve always been aware of the role of customer emotions in their overall experience. We undertook a significant piece of work to redesign the customer experience that people received when they first became an Egg customer. As a part of this we actively created emotional touchpoints where we sought to form an emotional bond with the customer.

Chris also highlights First Direct – a UK telephone bank – as an example of a company actively seeking to manage emotional responses in their dealings with customers.

At Egg I always cited First Direct as being a leader in financial services customer experience. On a personal level I bank with First Direct, and my personal experience is that their service is outstanding.

Their people deliver outstanding personal service in every transaction. While recruiting the right people is an important factor in achieving this, there are undoubtedly some pretty good customer experience tools being used as well to deliver such a consistently high standard of experience.